There’s something about Church of Ireland people that I tend to like.
The late Canon Eric Elliot, for example, whom I knew reasonably well,
was as modest and Christian a man as you could encounter. There are
exceptions but C of I people generally strike some sort of responsive
chord in me.

Maybe I’ve been lucky. The possibility of this took shape when I read
how last Sunday, St Anne’s Cathedral was stuffed with Orangemen
celebrating the signing of the Ulster Covenant. Now the Orange Order is,
as some of us have maybe noticed, an anti-Catholic organisation. In its
ordinances and in its history, it has been opposed to Catholicism at
every turn. And I won’t attempt to outline the dreary repetition of
Orange violence against Catholics charted in Andy Boyd’s book Holy War
in Belfast. Yet here was this same Oranger Order in a C of I cathedral.
Doing what? Celebrating the people who had made the signing of the
Ulster Covenant a success. Because from the point of view of unionism it
was a success. By threatening violence against the British state, it
helped ultimately carve out the six county-state. To recap: an event
which ushered the gun into twentieth-century Irish politics was
celebrated by an anti-Catholic organisation in a C of I cathedral. That
seems to me a long way from the gentle Canon Elliot I once knew.

Another man I quite like is Micheal Martin. He’s not Church of Ireland
but like Canon Elliot there’s a modesty to the man, a lack of
pretension that’s appealing. As you know, he’s the leader of the Fianna
Fail party which has broken its bones recently on rocky electoral
ground. Maybe that’s why he was in the papers this week, talking tripe.

Mild Micheal is reported as being at Arbour Hill last weekend, telling
his audience that it was historically dishonest and incorrect to equate
in any way the heroes who fought for Irish freedom in 1916 and in the
subsequent war of independence, with the actions of the Provisional IRA.
“The terrorist campaign that was waged in the North was not a clean
fight”.

The implication being that Easter 1916 and the subsequent years
constituted a “clean fight”. Mmm. Probably the first person to be shot
dead in the Easter Rising was a fourteen-year-old called Gerald
Playfair. He was the son of the commander of the Magazine Fort in the
Phoenix Park. He was running to alert the authorities that the fort had
been seized when a pursuing Volunteer shot him dead. And the Irish Times
on Monday carried an article about a historical dispute going on at
present about whether in Cork in 1922, the shooting dead of 13 people,
all Protestant, aged between 16 and 82 years, was motivated by
sectarianism.

Now you might say no amount of historical revisionism, wilful amnesia or
media indifference could change two brutal facts such as those above, or
other brutal events that happened during Easter 1916 and the war for
independence. But you’d be too late about saying any such thing, because
that’s what Micheal has already said at Arbour Hill. He condemned the
Provisional IRA campaign as being “unclean” and concluded with - yes,
you guessed it: “No amount of historical revisionism, wilful amnesia or
media indifference could alter that fact”.

So you see, it’s a mistake to assume that because someone is mild and
friendly that they’re not prepared to fly in the face of historical fact
if they believe it suits their purpose. The Church of Ireland has always
been happy to provide a friendly home for Orangeism, Fianna Fail, who
have rediscovered that they’re “the republican party” has always been
desperate to deny any “old” IRA/Provisional IRA continuity.

So I’m glad I knew Canon Elliot but I’m sorry he belonged to a Church
that aligns itself with an anti-Catholic organisation. Just as I like
the Cork mildness of Micheal Martin but I’m sorry he’s keen to gloss
over the acts of brutality that are a feature of any armed conflict.

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